The guys from Oculus want 120fps in games

I get how the refresh rate needs to be higher to get good VR, but 120fps? you are going to get some pretty shitty graphics, in some cases new games are going to look decidedly lastgen.

Add to that the rumor that the next VR headset from the company is going to be built by Samsung using phone hardware, which translates to X360-level power at best, and you are looking at PS2 graphics in 2015...

 

I think the thing to note is that VR has always been one step behind, if you want to have a truly immersive VR experience then you probably need to sacrifice somewhere else.

 

What are you talking about? I thought the Oculus connects to a PC - so it's the PC doing the graphical work, not the headset itself. The hardware inside the headset doesn't render the graphics. It's essentially just a display/interface. That's how I thought it worked, anyway.

I agree that 120Hz is a little excessive. You need a very powerful machine to get that kind of speed at ultra settings. I think a more reasonable goal would be a higher resolution, like QHD or even 4K. I think the current model uses 1080p, which I don't think is really enough for a display that fills your entire field of vision.

 

I think we should think in term of pixels per second if we want a proper comparison.

Well you know, increasing the resolution from 720p to 1080p (1.5 factor on the linear size) is increasing the number of pixels 2.25 times (1.5^2). So it's should be easier to process 720p @120Hz than 1080p @60Hz. From 1080p to 2160p (4K 16:9) the linear increase is 2, but it's 4 times the pixels. So 1080p @ 120Hz should be half as hard to do than 2160 @60Hz.

Just a though...

 

Perhaps, but I think 720p would look pretty crappy at that size. Imagine sitting 3 inches away from a TV outputting 720p. It probably wouldn't look very good.

It doesn't necessarily need to be 4K - I think QHD would do the job. QHD (1440p) is 2X the resolution in horizontal and vertical dimensions of 720p, and 4X the overall number of pixels. Some PCs can handle QHD pretty well. It would be a little different from a standard QHD display though, since it's 3D - and thus it needs to be rendered for each eye.

 

Having done a lot of research into VR/AR (complete with a pending patent application), I can tell you that resolution is MUCH less important than fps once you start factoring in head motion. If you don't have a sufficiently high fps, even very small head movements will cause motion sickness and break any sense of immersion.

 

Read my post: there are rumors than the consumer version will be like that. What you are describing were devkits.

It all started with zuckerberg saying he wanted to push VR to the masses even if that meant selling at costs or even subsidizing the thing. One problem they named many times is that for the average consumer getting the VR headset is step 1 and step 2 is where to connect it, which is why they are going for an all-in-one.

There's already a german company that sells an adapter that you can slide your phone into it and boom, VR headset for cheap.

1080p is not the problem since even cheap chinese phones have 1080p screen nowadays, the problem as said before is pushing those 120fps. Even with a K1 you are looking at some significant cuts in graphical quality.

Who knows, maybe flat-shaded polygons will make a comeback because of this...

 

There are no rumours for an Oculus headst that runs off phone hardware. There are rumours that in exchange for using Samsung screens in the consumer Rift Oculus are helping Samsung develop a headset peripheral you slot a phone into. It's a phone peripheral by Samsung, that's it.

The Rift is a display that connects to a PC, the consumer version will be like that too.

 

The Human eye can't even make something that high out.

 

Yes it can. Even long before LCD monitors it was common for CRT monitors to be running at that high of a refresh rate. I'm using a 120hz monitor now and I can instantly feel the difference, even just moving the mouse around the desktop. With VR it's even more important, if the perceived motion doesn't match up with your head's actual motion it'll increase the onset of simulator sickness. It's ridiculously important that the Rift can not just display at 90Hz+ but also sync it with low latency, high frequency head tracking, without it VR just doesn't work.

 

mairsil hit it on the head. Motion sickness from even to subtle shifting is common in people who aren't sensitive to this sort of thing. For those who are (like myself) it's more like watching an fps in a room with a strobe light on a boat.

 

To be fair, IIRC the human eyes see around 60 "frames per second". But the problem is what's between the frames: if it's pitch black between two frames (as on CRT) then the refreshing is very noticeable even at 60fps. But if the image is continuously displayed for 1/60th of a second then the next one is displayed for the same amount of time and so on, then it'll be very smooth. Cinema is mainly 24fps, but each frame is displayed more than once so there's minimal "black time" and it all seems smooth.

[EDIT]
Here's nice credible infos on that topic: http://bit.ly/1dUr3QF

 

That's temporal aliasing, it's a slightly different phenomenon. For games, or any sort of interactive use, the decreased response time and shorter latency "from motion to photons" is much, much more important. Watching a movie or anything like that doesn't have this issue because there is no interaction but once you put on a VR headset, and completely block out your eyes frame of reference, the motion it is displaying has to closely follow the motion information your vestibular system is feeding into your brain or else there's a conflict and you feel ill.

As for how many frames per second your eyes see, it's an irrelevant measurement in that context. Your eyes don't see in frames with different receptors being more sensitive than others and it's why 30Hz, 60Hz, 90Hz and 120Hz all feel progressively smoother despite a person not being able to distinguish the individual frames.

 

I think the point was that as long as it seems smooth it's ok. And that increased Hz on the display leads to more smoothness always but that it's more beneficial if the interframe is black as on CRT. My understanding is that even if the pc can only output 30fps, if you just print each frame 4 times in a row at 120Hz on the LCD it will feel smoother than one frame per refresh @ 30Hz.

That said OFC even if the screen was optically perfect, the programmers got to model the player so that the in-game movements of the head match closely the real one otherwise it'll be a real brainbleeding machine. There's also a few optical properties that screen can't ever reproduce and that will probably limit VR sessions a bit unless you get used to it; e.g. vergeance.

 

First of all we're NOT pigeons. 120fps is useless for most people.

I read about this recently and I guffawed at Luckey's demand for higher framerates, especially when the Oculus Rift can do 30fps nicely because at higher rates, users of VR sets started complaining of motion sickness and other things. That piece of information came from this month's Wired Magazine.

Personally I don't give a flying fig about framerates and what not. If it looks nice and you have the power to push the capabilities go for it. I agree there should be at least a floor regarding graphical fidelity especially when the system it runs on is touted as top of the line and such.

 

Except the opposite is true. When the frame rate is lower people got ill, not higher, the whole point of going higher is to minimise simulator sickness.

 

Wierd, I thought most virtual reality relies on high framerates? As low framerates ruin immersion and possibly introduce motion sickness for certain people?

 

That was BEFORE the sale, they been using phone screens ever since the first prototype put together with duct tape.

Look this is what everyone was bitching about when FB bought the damn thing, that they are not into gaming and thus the priorities would shift making core gamers second potato to FB users

Honestly I don't care, the Morpheus demo at E3 showed that oculus dont have anything other companies can't replicate, it was just the typical first-to-market situation which BTW is not a warranty of success since most of the time is the second or third company entering that field that dominates.

 

I'm sure they meant 120Hz for the display refresh rate - not 120 fps.

 

No, 120 fps. It is the disparity in movement at low frame rates, not the display update/blanking/fading, which is a problem.